About
Why we built this.
Health information technology was supposed to make care safer. Often it has — and often it quietly hasn't. HIT Safety Report exists to close the gap between what clinicians see and what the field ever learns about.
Why we exist
The trouble is that we rarely find out where health IT fails, because the errors and near-misses that clinicians see every day almost never make it onto the record.
The reasons are structural. Reporting mechanisms are clunky and time-consuming, built for compliance rather than for the busy people expected to use them. Screenshots and vendor bug lists — the clearest evidence of a flaw — are frequently suppressed by contract. And when something goes wrong, it is far easier to blame "user error" than to question the design that set the user up to fail. The result is a vast void of missing knowledge: problems that are real, widespread, and unseen, because no one built an honest, low-friction way to surface them.
HIT Safety Report is that way. We are the opposite of the log-in-elsewhere, fill-out-fourteen-fields reporting sites clinicians have learned to avoid. We are fast, confidential, and built for the people who actually face these problems — so that what they see can finally be counted, studied, and fixed.
What we believe
Six convictions guide this work.
- Bad design is a safety problem, not a user problem. Blaming clinicians hides the fault instead of fixing it.
- You cannot fix what you cannot see. Errors that go unreported cannot be studied, and problems that aren't studied don't improve.
- Reporting must be effortless. If it takes more than a few minutes, it won't happen — and it shouldn't have to.
- Confidentiality earns the truth. People tell you what's really going on only when they trust they're protected.
- Patients come first, always. No report is worth a patient's privacy; identifying detail never belongs here.
- Evidence changes systems. Patterns across many honest reports are what move vendors, health systems, and payers to build better.
Our commitment
We stay on it until it's fixed.
We do not file a report and walk away. When a clinician documents a problem here, we keep the report public and keep contacting the named company — vendor, health system, or payer — until the issue is genuinely addressed. Reports are not takedown targets; they are an open record of a problem clinicians have experienced. Visibility is the accountability.
We only mark a report resolved when we can show verifiable proof: a documented fix, a released patch, a policy change, or a direct confirmation we can point to. Until that proof exists, the report stays up and the outreach continues.
Who's behind this
The people building it.
Founder
Physician · Builder · Ethicist
Emergency Medicine · Clinical Informatics · Clinical Ethics · Medical Device Innovation · Temple, Texas
Kevin Thomas Malone, MD is an emergency medicine physician, a clinical informatics fellow, and a certified Clinical Ethicist based in Temple, Texas, with additional work in medical device innovation. He founded and builds HIT Safety Report, bringing together three vantage points that rarely sit in one person: the clinician at the bedside who feels a bad interface in real time, the informaticist who understands why the system behaves that way, and the ethicist who asks what patients and clinicians are owed when technology gets in the way of care.
That combination is what motivated the platform. On shift in the emergency department, Kevin saw how usability gaps, alert fatigue, and stalled prior authorizations quietly shape patient care — problems that are widely felt but rarely documented in one credible, public place. HIT Safety Report is his answer: a calm, evidence-based registry where clinicians can name the technology problems they encounter and where those reports stay visible until they are resolved with proof.
Guiding voice
Distinguished Fellow, College of Medical Informatics (AMIA)
Professor of Medical Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania · Professor of Sociology, Penn School of Arts & Sciences · Senior Fellow, Penn Center for Public Health Initiatives
Ross Koppel is one of the most influential voices in the study of health information technology and patient safety. He is one of only six people ever named a Distinguished Fellow of the College of Medical Informatics by AMIA — a recognition of work widely regarded as seminal.
His research pairs rigorous statistical analysis with ethnography — numbers alongside close, on-the-ground observation of how clinicians and technology actually interact. Published in JAMA, JAMIA, NEJM, the Annals of Internal Medicine, and Health Affairs, and translated for the public in more than a dozen op-eds with Stephen Soumerai, ScD, of Harvard across the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Boston Globe, and STAT News, his work is widely credited with changing how the field understands computer-enhanced medical errors and clinician frustration. For more than a decade he has also worked with computer scientists and the National Security Agency on cybersecurity and the protection of medical records.
"We need to fix the software and the interoperability to reduce errors. Reporting is essential — but too many errors are never known, written off as poor implementation or user incompetence, and made hard to report by clunky mechanisms, legal fears, and quiet pressure not to." — Ross Koppel, PhD
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